Francis Marshall and The Beautiful People

The Summer exhibition at The Gallery of Everything features Francis Marshall and the Beautiful People, an oeuvre of seminal works by the self-proclaimed outsider artist, exhibited collectively for the first time in the UK.

The sprawling studio of Francis Marshall is an open-air theatre of a wondrous and peculiar folk. For the population of this artistic endeavour are the random and everyday, the curious and the bored, where family feasts and abandoned waiting-rooms squash their cast’s bulbous bodies into tight-fitted space.

Marshall’s people are beautiful people. They live in the wilderness, unattended for decades, and their skins share a patina of dirt stink and sun. Like the leathery works of a time long forgot, Marshall’s figures seem to mirror the personality of their maker. They yearn for another kind of life.